George DeNormand | Through the Shattered Lens

Dan Stanton (Edmund Cobb) and Condon (Tom Quinn) are planning to run a bunch of ranchers off their land by cutting off their water supply. Once the ranchers leave, Stanton and Condon will be able to sell their land to the railroads. After the bad guys murder a rancher named Jennings (George Morell), the rancher’s daughter (Lynne Carver) sends a message to U.S. Marshals Nevada Jack McKenzie (Johnny Mack Brown) and Sandy Hopkins (Raymond Hatton). Old friends of the murdered rancher, Sandy and Nevada come to town to rally the ranchers against Stanton and his men and to free up the water that’s been dammed up.

This was a pretty standard Johnny Mack Brown western. Johnny Mack Brown and Raymond Hatton always made for a good team but the story here is pretty predictable. After you watch enough B-westerns, you start to wonder if there were any made that weren’t about outlaws trying to run ranchers off their land. It’s interesting that these movies almost always center, in some way, around the coming of the railroad. The railroad is opening up the frontier and bringing America together but it also brings out the worst in the local miscreants.

As with a lot of B-westerns, the main pleasure comes from spotting the familiar faces in the cast. Charles King and Herman Hack play bad guys. Tex Driscoll plays a rancher. Horace B. Carpenter has a small role. These movies were made and remade with the same cast so often that that watching them feels like watching a repertory company trying out their greatest hits.

There’s another range war brewing on the frontier. Big Jim Kirby (George Chesebro) knows there’s plans for a new railroad so he wants to steal the land from the ranchers so he can make a fortune off a selling it. Kirby calls in everyone’s mortgage, knowing they’ll never be able to pay. Rancher Tom Grant (Buster Slaven) reaches out to Cheyenne Davis (Lash LaRue, a look alike for Humphrey Bogart)) and Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al St. John) for help. Cheyenne raises the money but then he makes the mistake of trusting Fuzzy to deliver it. Fuzzy takes a knock to the noggin and now, he’s got amnesia. Where’s the money?

This is a standard B-western and you know the drill. Big Jim’s henchmen don’t want that money to get paid. Cheyenne is on the side of the angels. Fuzzy provides comic relief. Lash LaRue appeared in several B-westerns. He never became as big a star as some of his contemporaries but he did have a gimmick that made him memorable. Most westerns stars used guns. LaRue had a bullwhip. When LaRue was first offered the role of Cheyenne, he lied and said he could crack a whip. After he struggled to teach himself, tiny production company PRC hired a professional trainer. That was a huge expense for a poverty row studio but it paid off because LaRue became proficient with the whip and he had a surprisingly long career. He was born Alfred LaRue. The studio came up with the Lash nickname. Many western stars, like Johnny Mack Brown, played characters who shared their name. Lash almost always played Cheyenne Davis.

Lash LaRue’s movies were cheap and never that memorable. In this one, Lash barely appears and most of the action is carried out by Al St. John as Fuzzy. But Lash LaRue did play an important part in Hollywood history when he briefly came out of retirement to teach Harrison Ford how to crack a whip for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.